Epiphany 1, Year A
Matthew 3:13-17
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
January 12, 2020
Jonathan Hanneman
“Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” – Matthew 3:15
Growing up, I really wanted to be like Jesus. I knew all the stories about him: how he turned water into wine, healed people, and even raised the dead. I listened to them week in and week out, and somehow they never got old. Jesus was like a modern superhero, overcoming the bad guys and rescuing the weak. He was smarter than anyone else, even the legendary King Solomon. He could read minds like Professor Charles Xavier, founder of the X-Men. Like an alchemist from European lore, he could transform matter and multiply it into different objects. If push came to shove, I was certain he was strong enough to do anything he wanted without anyone being able to stop him—and he always did what was right, just like Superman. In keeping with many comic book and movie heroes (Professor X and Superman included), he also just couldn’t seem to stay dead.
But I also learned that Jesus wasn’t make-believe. He wasn’t just a story. He was real—about 2,000 years ago, he really had lived on earth (and continued to live in heaven). And in mythic, sci-fi fashion, one day he would return to our planet to set right every wrong and restore proper order to the world, establishing the everlasting Kingdom of God—and definitively proving our particular branch of Christianity to be right about religion and the afterlife in the process.
Jesus was amazing. Jesus was great. He knew everything that God knew and could do anything that God could do, because Jesus actually was God in human guise.
This was the Jesus I knew, the Jesus I respected and sang songs about, the Jesus I loved as a child, and the Jesus I trusted as my Savior.
But as I grew older, things became more difficult for me in my relationship with Jesus. Jesus hadn’t changed—I knew that he was immutably, eternally perfect. But I began to change. I tried to live like Jesus, to always do what was right. But choosing right from wrong became a lot more difficult as I learned about and experienced unintended consequences. I wanted to be smart and creative like Jesus. But that wasn’t a great way to make friends in our sports-obsessed Separatist Christian community. Long after I knew better, I kept trying to develop supernatural powers like Jesus, staring at coins for minutes at a time until I could move them with my mind. (I figured telekinesis was a good first step toward manipulating matter. And in case you’re wondering, it never worked.) While I felt I could follow Jesus to some extent, I started to realize I could never be truly godly like he was.
As an overthinker, this lead me into some dark places. I actively rejected my emotions as I tried to be less human. Reading the Bible in a severely literal fashion, I surmised that sin was infused into my very being: my soul, my mind, even my body itself. I unwittingly slipped into one of the oldest heresies, inferring that the physical was inferior to the spiritual. Whenever I read Jesus saying, “If your eye offends you, pluck it out,” I remember asking God how to do that without killing myself, since it was my brain, with its instincts and involuntary thinking, that offended me most.
The Jesus I knew “could hit a hole-in-one every time,” as an adult Christian Education teacher once told a class I was visiting. I knew Jesus as God, but despite also knowing the doctrine of the Trinity and the two natures of Christ, I didn’t know Jesus as a human. He was too far beyond me in his perfection. He was unrelatable to someone with flaws and sins like me. He—and heaven—were impossible to reach.
In today’s Gospel Matthew introduces us to a Jesus I never knew. Despite some supernatural trappings like visions and voices from the sky, here we see a very human Jesus. Not a Jesus trying to be human. Not a Jesus pretending to be human. No, here we have a fully human Jesus doing completely human things and participating in mundane, genuinely human rituals.
Three and a half chapters in, this is also the first time we hear Jesus speak in Matthew’s Gospel. We’ve met the book’s main character. We’ve been watching him and know a decent bit about his growing up. But so far he’s only been a participant in events: things have happened to him. Here Jesus finally starts to act. He starts to talk. He begins to assume agency in his own story.
I think it’s interesting that the first thing Matthew records Jesus doing of his own volition is responding to a religious impulse. As far as I know, humans are the only creatures on earth that even have concepts of religion. We read of animals and birds instinctively fleeing the fires across Australia, but we don’t find cockatoos, kangaroos, and koalas praying for rain. Despite their complex social structures and communications, ants and bees don’t seem to have any rituals to engage with an abstract, unseen greater power. Only humans do those things. So here we have Matthew giving us an inherently human Jesus, one who has heard about this prophet John baptizing people in the wilderness and who chooses to join his religious movement.
If you look online, you’ll find that a bunch of speculation about the why of Jesus’ baptism. After all, doctrine teaches us that Jesus was sinless, so he didn’t need to repent. And repentance was what John’s baptism was all about. There are some fascinating and sometimes convoluted theories about Jesus’ baptism out there, but we need to remember not to read later thoughts onto the story. Matthew is plenty obsessed with theology and fulfillment of Hebrew prophecy, but he’s unlikely to be battling with ideas that arose in Western Christian logic hundreds or thousands of years after he wrote. He’s presenting Jesus as he knew him. He wants us to understand Jesus as he knew him. And Jesus, as Matthew knew him, was no invincible Superman. He was genuinely real. He was genuinely human.
Part of the difficulty people have with this text is the content of Jesus’ statement to John, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Again, we have the problem of reading later foreign thought back onto the incident. “Righteousness” is a highly charged word in the history of Christian thought. It’s become jargon for us, carrying so many meanings and implications that it can’t hold any of them anymore. Modern theologians tend to define it as a sort of goodness or purity that God proclaims for those who believe in Christ, a judicially declared state of innocence. It’s sort of like humanity is somehow restored to perfection (while still remaining imperfect) or something that completely hides all our sin and shortcomings from God. But again, that’s centuries of debate being read back onto the text.
I don’t want you to think that development of thought or doctrine is bad—there are some very helpful ideas that theologians have worked out over the centuries. But I’m hoping to understand what Jesus was saying without the jargon or overlays, without 2,000 years of philosophy piled onto the text. When I lived in China, all the food was covered in some kind of sauce. The sauce tasted great—I loved it. But sometimes I missed the flavor of the vegetables by themselves. This is a similar thing.
Our Bibles also translate the word behind “righteousness” as “justice,” another highly charged word. Digging back thousands of years before Christ, scholars believe the root was derived from a Sanskrit word meaning “balance” or “horizon,” some sort of dividing line[1]. A few hundred years before Jesus’ time, the Greek Philosopher Plato was using the term to describe people or things that behave “in accordance with their nature” or local custom[2]. When Matthew wrote his Gospel, the word had acquired some legal connotations, but there was another common word that often referred to our idea of “justice” in declarative, legal sentencing type of situation.
The best way I understand the kind of “righteousness/justice” the word suggests is similar to how we would use the word “alignment.” It’s “just” in the sense of building a wall: appropriately leveled, straight, and upright. More common for most of us might be “justification” of text on a page: something aligned to a standard margin. It’s “righteous” in the sense of being appropriately ordered. It’s like truing a bicycle wheel, perfectly tightening and aligning all the spokes between the hub and the rim.
With that understanding of the word, I don’t think Jesus is trying to do anything strange here. He isn’t trying to fulfill some obscure prophecy or provide debate material about how perfect or sinless he is, and I don’t think Matthew is either. Matthew is giving us a very human Jesus doing a very human thing. John may or may not be recognizing Jesus’ divine nature in this passage—today’s text doesn’t say that anyone but Jesus saw the skies open and the dove descending. But I know Jesus is doing something any one of us can do: he’s looking for where the Spirit of God is working in this world—where love, goodness, and faith are overflowing—and aligning himself with it.
Jesus is fully God. And Jesus is fully, completely human. We don’t know how that works—no one really does. And when it comes to theology, as one of my seminary professors frequently reminded us, it’s often best to let the mystery stand. What we need to know—what I especially needed to know—was that Jesus really was one of us, a perfectly normal, perfectly human person. He wasn’t some kind of superhero or genetically superior mutant or hybrid. He certainly wouldn’t have always scored a hole-in-one or even won all the games he played with the other kids. Because being human is no sin. In the baptism of our Lord, we see the incarnate Son of God embracing his humanity, and in so doing, embracing all of humanity. No matter how broken or sinful we think we might be, Jesus—and the Kingdom of Heaven—has never been beyond our reach. And we are never out of his.
[1] http://ispcjournal.org/journals/2017/Salamone_Philosophy_and_Cosmology_vol_18.pdf